The blue mood of Jesse Cook at The Egg

ALBANY -- Jesse Cook has released nine CDs in 17 years and sold 1.5 million records worldwide. The son of film director John Cook, he began emulating the sounds of southern French guitarist Manitas de Plata at the age of 3, and has studied at Berklee College of Music and taken lessons from Eli Kassner, a student of the iconic Andre Segovi.

And yet, Cook, a master of new-age Flamenco guitar, describes his latest work as if it were his first real escape to freedom. "I wanted to record "The Blue Guitar Sessions" for a number of years. So to finally take the cork off the bottle and see what comes out was exciting," said the Toronto resident who plays The Egg in Albany Friday night.

"Normally, in the studio, I'll just keep slogging away at something, sometimes to its determent. So it's one of those things. I don't know if it's that WASPy thing of feeling like you need to be working all the time. Work is what we love to do, but maybe it works when I'm engineering, when I'm mixing the album or producing them, but it certainly doesn't work when I'm writing, and that's what I learned from this project."

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Until now, Cook's kitchen has concocted a real gumbo of rumba Flamenco with a lot of jazz elements. On early records like "Tempest," "Gravity" and "Vertigo," "the field was clear. There wasn't anybody doing what I was doing."

For "Nomad," he went off to Cairo to put his work in new context. "The Rumba Foundation," his last CD before "The Blue Guitar Sessions," he recorded in Columbia with indigenous musicians. "They'd never worked with my kind of music. I'd never worked with their kind of music, and it created a puzzle that we had to solve together. (But) on this record, "The Blue Guitar Sessions," it wasn't a geographic location as much as it was a tonal location.

Cook wrote the new record while on vacation with his family, not in the studio. It is an extemporaneous expression of one consistent mood, blue without an "s" on the end of it. He likens it to Mile Davis' "Kind of Blue" or Nora Jones' "Come Away with Me." "I'd just sit down with a guitar in the morning and start noodling around until I heard something I liked, and then I'd write it down or I'd record it."

No pressure! But in letting the cork out of the bottle, he had to be careful not to spill the contents. "When you write something, when you've just composed it, you have an understanding of what makes it work that sometimes gets lost, even if you play the same notes later on. Often, the initial recording captures an essence that's hard to recreate."

Cook used a new analog to digital converter and a fine microphone to capture these initial guitar sounds as he was creating them. "I was writing a song a day. I didn't have to feel like I needed to polish each song until it was a perfect object."

The process became fun. "I think of the recording studio as a sandbox that you go in and you play. You can't be thinking to yourself, 'I've got to craft a hit.' You've got to be just thinking, 'I'm gonna have fun. What have I got to have fun with today?' "

Simplicity was the watchword. "The longer you play, you can sometimes wear out the effect of simple music, and yet simple music is sometimes the most direct. You look at the great pieces of music that we love and that have endured. Mozart, (he hums) simple, simple music, and yet he has endured.

"Yet when you go to music school, and they start teaching you all about complex tensions and voicings and alternate harmonic structures, all these things, you start to feel like, 'Oh, I can't do this.' And that's one of the things you have to spend the rest of your career unlearning -- the idea that learning is somehow bad.

Jesse Cook thinks of improv as composing in real time. With "The Blue Guitar Sessions," he brings a cultured background to simple songs that work on both an intellectual and visceral level.